Chapter 134: The Dream Breaks

Chapter 134: The Dream Breaks

POV: Astrid Vale

The moment I said it, everything shifted.

The walls of the small room stretched impossibly long, then snapped back into place, warping like heat rising off summer pavement. My mother’s face flickered, warm and grieving one second, cold and expressionless the next, some other shape underneath fighting to surface through the mask she’d been wearing.

"You’re making a mistake," she said, her voice layered now, wrong in a way I couldn’t fully explain. "This is the only way you can have me back."

"You’re not her," I said again, backing further away.

The room answered by showing me things I hadn’t asked for.

Ivy, bleeding out on cold stone, her eyes empty. Reed and Xander searching endless corridors that led nowhere, calling my name into rooms that stayed forever empty.

My mother’s beautiful face crumbling into dust the moment I reached for her again.

Elaris burning, the tunnels collapsing, screaming echoing through streets I’d only just started to understand.

Liora’s wolf torn apart by soldiers who’d once called her by name. The entire underground city turning toward me, faces twisted with grief and rage, blaming me for everything that had gone wrong. Blaming me for existing.

"Leaving will only bring you pain," the voice whispered, layered now over my mother’s familiar tone. "Stay, and none of this has to happen."

I understood, watching all of it unfold, that this wasn’t trying to kill me. It was trying to make me choose this, to make staying feel like the only survivable option.

To live in this comfortable lie.

I thought of Ivy’s face the moment I’d pulled the cloth from her mouth, real and terrified and alive. I thought of Liora injecting herself, throwing her body between us and the soldiers without a second’s hesitation. I thought of the actual reason I’d walked into that east wing in the first place, believing my best friend needed me.

They were real. All of them. And if this illusion could make me doubt an entire city I’d spent days living inside, it could make me doubt anyone, twist any memory into something unrecognizable if I let it.

That thought steadied something in me.

I looked around the dissolving room, searching for anything that didn’t belong to this fabricated world, and found it sitting on the edge of the bed where it had no business being.

My phone. Cracked screen, exactly as it had been the night I’d dropped it in the east wing.

I crossed to it and picked it up with shaking hands. The screen flickered to life despite the damage, and the same message still glowed there, unchanged.

Too late.

Something in my chest hardened around that small, ugly proof.

"Astrid," my mother’s voice said, softer now, pleading. "Please, don’t."

I looked at the phone in my hand, then at her, and understood I couldn’t wait for this place to collapse on its own. I had to tear it down myself.

I smashed the phone against the edge of the dresser, and the room cracked instantly, a fissure splitting straight through the wall behind her, spreading outward in jagged lines. My mother’s face contorted, the warmth bleeding out of her voice entirely.

"Stop," she said, her voice fracturing into something layered and wrong. "You’ll lose me again."

"I already lost you once," I said, tears streaking down my face even as my hands kept moving, kept tearing at whatever illusion still clung to the space around me. "I’m not losing myself too."

The room shattered.

I woke violently, gasping, and the warmth and candlelight of my childhood home were gone entirely, replaced by cold stone pressing hard against my back. Voices murmured around me, low and rhythmic. The metallic smell of blood hung thick in the air.

My wrists were bound.

I turned my head, fighting through the disorientation, and found Ivy nearby, restrained the same way I was, her eyes wide with terror when they found mine.

"Astrid," she breathed.

I looked down at myself and my stomach dropped straight through the stone beneath me.

I was on an altar. Tubes ran from a container beside me directly into my arm, and dark liquid was already moving slowly through the line, drawn straight from my own vein. My blood, being taken while I’d been trapped somewhere else entirely, lost inside a lie designed to keep me still and compliant while they did exactly this.

I tried to move. The restraints held fast.

Across the room, Ivy strained uselessly against her own bindings, and around us both, dozens of Elarisi stood gathered in a loose circle, their faces solemn, expectant, waiting.

Then they began to speak, all of them together, the same low, unified rhythm I remembered from that first dinner.

"Beneath the earth, we endure. Beneath the moon, we remember. What was taken shall return. What was cursed shall be cleansed. What lies above shall one day be ours again."

I understood, hearing it now with total clarity, exactly what they believed this moment meant.

"Leave her alone!" I screamed, twisting hard against the restraints, my voice cracking with the effort. "She has nothing to do with this!"

Nobody stopped. Nobody even looked at me directly, their attention fixed on whatever ritual they were completing, the creed still rolling steadily through the room like something rehearsed a thousand times before.

The fear building in my chest shifted then, curdling into something else entirely, something that had been sitting dormant inside me for longer than I understood.

My fingers curled, and pain shot through them as something sharpened at the tips, nails lengthening into something that wasn’t quite human anymore. My vision sharpened at the edges, colors bleeding brighter, sounds suddenly closer, louder, more distinct than they’d been a moment ago.

The metal restraints around my wrists groaned under a pressure I hadn’t consciously applied, small fractures spreading through the links.

They had brought a girl underground believing they understood exactly what she was.

They had no idea what they’d actually taken.